With the end of December fast approaching, businesses and marketers are focusing on the upcoming year and deciding what areas they will dedicate their resources towards. Planning ahead is vital and for many businesses, their efforts will be dedicated towards digital platforms in a bid to increase awareness and promote their services.

A survey conducted by StrongMail, an email and social media marketing company, found that more than half of B2B marketers will be increasing their marketing budget for 2012. Only 8 per cent said that they would be decreasing it in some way while the rest intend to maintain their current budget.

The areas in question which will see their spending increased included email marketing (60 per cent), social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin (55 per cent) and SEO & Mobile (37 per cent each). While the use of email marketing is high, the majority of marketers (68 per cent) plan to integrate it with social media in their marketing plans next year.

The majority of marketers aim to obtain new customers and users as well as engage or re-engaging with existing or old customers. This falls into line with what marketers feel is the primary value of social media with three out of five stating that awareness building was its most important quality (64 per cent).

Building consumer loyalty was also cited as a reason (48 per cent) while expanding to reach new audiences was also deemed important (44 per cent). When asked about the values of mobile marketing, similar answers to the previous question were given with building brand awareness being the most important quality (35 per cent).Increasing Brand Awareness
Focusing on social media platforms, businesses valued marketing technology as the most important area to focus on. Facebook marketing programs was seen as the most important (39 per cent) alongside Social media Management Technology, Viral/Refereal Marketing Campaigns (25 per cent each) and Twitter Marketing Programs (24 per cent).

One area that marketers are unsure of is mobile marketing with 48 per cent either unsure about the platform or don’t intend on focusing on smartphone advertising. Of those who were using the platform, 29 per cent plan on building an app for smartphones while 22 per cent were going to concentrate on mobile advertising.

The majority of companies asked were small businesses with between 1-50 employees making up 38 per cent with the next biggest group being businesses having more than 1,000 employees (26 per cent).

The survey, entitled “2012 Marketing Trends” was conducted online by Zoomerang on behalf of StrongMail and had responses from over 939 business leaders from a wide range of industries. The survey was conducted from November 16th to the 29th. The full report can be found here.